In his first-class popular history, Dan Cohn-Sherbok “sets out to illustrate that for twenty centuries Christian anti-Semitism has generated hostility toward the Jewish faith and the people of Israel.” The work proceeds through these chapters: the Greco-Roman world, anti-Judaism in the New Testament, the church fathers and Jewish hatred, medieval persecutions, ritual murder, and the Talmud, the demonic image of the Jew, postmedieval anti-Semitism in France, England, and Germany, Spanish persecution and the Inquisition, the dispersion of the Marranos, anti-Semitism in Eastern Europe, Western Jewry in the early modern period, the Enlightenment in England, France, and Germany, the emancipation of the Jews, Judeophobia in the early nineteenth century, modern images of the Jew in Germany, France, and Russia, prelude to the Holocaust, the death camps, anti-Semitism in a post-Holocaust world, and finally, toward reconciliation.
The story is told simply and accessibly. Cohn-Sherbok acknowledges his debt to classic works, especially Leon Poliakov’s History of Anti-Semitism (1974) and Rosemary Radford Reuther’s Faith and Fratricide: The Theological Roots of Anti-Semitism (1974), as well as a number of topical monographs. But for the many readers who are not going to open the academic histories and monographs, Cohn-Sherbok has performed a great service. Here is the whole ghastly, dreary story. The gist is this:
For twenty centuries . . . Christian anti-Semitism has served either directly or indirectly as a fundamental cause of Judaeophobia. In the ancient, medieval, and early modern period, hostility toward the Jews was explicitly Christian in origin. In modern times this legacy of Christian anti-Semitism provided the background and language of Jew-hatred.
Two points, one minor, the other not, should register. First, some attention to the situation of Jews in Islam (Muslims occur only in the discussion of “Black Muslims”) for comparison and contrast would have made this judgment weightier. Of greater consequence, Cohn-Sherbok does not sufficiently differentiate between Christian and racist Nazi anti-Semitism. If Christianity were no different from nazism, Jews would not have survived in Christian Europe for two thousand years; but they did, and Jews today would not find within Christianity ample good will for themselves and their religion, but they do.
After all, Eerdmans places its imprint on this book! Treating Christianity as a way station on the road to Auschwitz moreover ignores the brilliant analysis by Stephen T. Katz, who argues that the anti-Semitism that led to the Holocaust in no way continues the anti-Judaism of Christianity–or its anti-Semitism. It took racist anti-Semitism, a political and secular movement, to bring about the horrors of German-occupied Europe from 1933 through 1945.
In the balance, Cohn-Sherbok has provided the standard popular history of anti-Semitism for the next generation–until, alas, the story will require updating. But if this book keeps its promise, future anti-Semitism will find its sources elsewhere than in the church founded by Jesus Christ.
Only a Jew who has converted to Christianity and become a scholar of the New Testament can have written Jesus and the Holocaust, and I am certain no self-respecting Jew, practicing the religion of Judaism, will admire it. That is the case, even though Joel Marcus writes a clean and orderly prose, and even though some of the Holocaust stories he exploits for his sermons are profoundly wrenching. What Marcus wants–to compare the Passion to the Holocaust–Christians of other-than-Jewish origin cannot find pertinent, and Jews who have not apostatized from Judaism cannot concede. For my part I find the book presumptuous and spiritually repulsive.
A Jew by ethnic identification and a Christian by religion, Marcus used the occasion of preaching on Good Friday in 1995 on Jesus’ suffering so as “to explore the links between that one Jewish death and the six million Jewish deaths that occurred more than nineteen hundred years later.” His intent is “to see if the hope that Christians have always found hidden in the darkest hour of the liturgical year might shed any light on the most tragic moment of our recent history–and vice versa.” The occasion was the fiftieth year beyond the end of the Holocaust in 1945, and the setting, the Episcopal cathedral in Glasgow.
The book is well summarized by the author:
It is the central intuition of this book that these two forms of communion–with the tragedies of Jewish history, culminating in the Holocaust, and with Jesus’ death on the cross–are inextricably bound up with each other. A corollary is that the tikkun of the world, its repair, restoration, and redemption–including the redemption of Israel–has already been decisively inaugurated in Jesus’ resurrection from the dead. But that corollary belongs essentially to the preaching of Easter, rather than to that of Good Friday.
If Marcus maintains that “in the shared suffering of Christians and Jews, a common bond exists for healing the hurt all have experienced in the death of Christ and the horror of the Holocaust. By recognizing this bond and empathizing with one another, the cycle of blame and violence can be stopped,” he commits an extravagance. For a Jew who becomes a Christian, equating the crucifixion with the Holocaust may provide an appropriate calculus. But for a Jew who practices Judaism, the book constitutes unrelieved blasphemy, committing a profound offense against the sanctity of the unique suffering of Holy Israel. One man against six million–if that is Marcus’s ratio, it is beyond this Jew’s comprehension.
But neither Christianity, with the resurrection beyond Good Friday, nor Judaism, with the miracle of the State of Israel beyond the Holocaust, can celebrate this brooding, depressing, excessively private meditation. For living Judaism today, the Holocaust without what has happened since then–I mean, the restoration of the people, Israel, to the Land of Israel, the renewal of Judaism, the religion, both of them powerful testimonies to God’s love for Israel his people–bears no more meaning than, for living Christianity, Good Friday without Easter Sunday can matter. Judaism is a vital religion today, and for an ethnic Jew who has become a Christian to exploit the anguish of holy Israel in this way represents an act of imperialist expropriation that borders on the ghoulish.
Jacob Neusner is Distinguished Research Professor of Religious Studies at the University of South Florida and visiting professor of religion at Bard College. He is the author of many books, including a three-volume series with Bruce D. Chilton, Christianity and Judaism: The Formative Categories (Trinity Press International).
Copyright(c) 1997 by Christianity Today, Inc./Books & Culture magazine.
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